Medieval Anglo-Irish Troubles: A Cultural Study of BL MS Harley 913

British Library MS Harley 913 is an early fourteenth-century trilingual manuscript produced in Anglo-Ireland whose paradoxically devotional and ribald contents display many distinct aspects of the Anglo-Irish socio-political reality of the day.

However, many of its texts have, in the past, suffered from repeated scholarly misreadings, in part because scholars have not taken the time to seriously consider the manuscript's contents as a whole, and in part because fluctuations in the political, societal/social and religious climate between Ireland and England have prejudiced how some scholars have approached the works.

In Medieval Anglo-Irish Troubles, Deborah Moore discusses these texts in the order in which they occur in the manuscript, as well as their misreadings and reveals the pattern of politicised interpretation of this important medieval Anglo-Irish cultural artefact that has hitherto obscured, rather than elucidated, the very personal interactions of some of the era's key figures. The taboos of incest, regicide and witchcraft, along with the clandestine manoeuvrings of the power-hungry and influential reveal a surprisingly complicated interlacing of events in medieval Ireland, England and the Continent.

For the first time, this volume allows readers to visualize the manuscript and read for themselves about the genesis of Medieval Anglo-Irish Troubles.